What Not To Write On Your Security Clearance Form as reported in the [REDACTED] list and RISKS Date: 01 Apr 88 1620 PSTFrom: Les Earnest LES…@S…Subject: The “previous account” referred to in RISKS-6.51 e-t-a-o-n-r-i Spy and the FBI Reading a … Read more
In May, OpenAI agreed to pay $3 billion for Windsurf, the AI coding assistant formerly known as Codeium. Three billion dollars. For a VSCode fork. The deal eventually fell apart, but what matters is that they wanted to do it … Read more
After reading the book The AWK Programming Language (recommended!), I was planning to try AWK out on this year’s Advent of Code. Having some time off from work this week, I tried to implement one of the problems in it … Read more
C is barebones and “doesn’t support” generics, but it’s actually quite easy to implement with the tools we already have. There’s many ways you might find them being implemented in the wild. Some of the common ones are: Using function-like … Read more
TigerBeetle is a financial transactions database built for correctness. Yet, building a correct system from correct components remains a challenge: Composing systems, each correct in isolation, does not necessarily yield a correct system. In this post, we’ll explore how to … Read more
A web server with no application logic. Just an LLM with three tools. The Shower Thought One day we won’t need code. LLMs will output video at 120fps, sample inputs in realtime, and just… be our computers. No apps, no … Read more
[embedded content] Teaching child visitors how to write their names using an unfamiliar or antique alphabet is a favorite activity of museum educators, but Dr. Irving Finkel, a cuneiform expert who specializes in ancient Mesopotamian medicine and magic, has grander … Read more
This post documents how I built a cross-platform Elixir NIF in C to get on-demand up-to-date disk-usage stats without relying on os_mon and its disksup service. I had Grok 3 generate the initial C code and Makefile, then iterated through … Read more
Marco Giancotti, August 15, 2025 Cover image: Kazuenokami Katō Kiyomasa Observing a Monkey with a Writing Brush, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi I recently came across a short essay about kanji—Japanese logographic characters—by a certain James W. Heisig. His point is that learning … Read more
The interfaces between C and Rust in the kernel have grown over time; any non-trivial Rust driver will use a number of these. Tasks like allocating memory, dealing with immovable structures, and interacting with locks are necessary for handling most … Read more